After placing it on centre-stage during the campaign, “power sharing” seemed to have been dropped like a hot potato by the coalition APNU/AFC government, even though it had made it the sine qua non of its vision of democracy for Guyana. “Democracy”, of course, has become the standard for evaluating the credentials of governments across the world in modern times.
While we may all be a bit fuzzy on what exactly we mean by “democracy”, we should accept it’s merely a means to a particular end. To wit, the facilitation of a harmonious society in which each member can fulfil his or her human potential to the fullest. Even when we claim that we have a “democratic” government, it behoves us to always question as to whether its particulars are fully in sync with the idiosyncrasies and foibles of the given time, place and circumstances, to deliver us to our goal.
And this brings us to our “democracy” in Guyana. No one would deny Guyana today is “democratic” by many of the common indicators: freedom of the press, speech, movement, political participation, civic association, etc. But is our society more harmonious? Not many Guyanese would answer “yes”. Why have we been literally locked in combat for the past fifty years? We can blame evil politicians, nefarious foreign elements or other extrinsic factors, but we cannot avoid examining the nature of our society and the political institutions that are supposed to deliver the “good society”. Form does affect function.
After all, political institutions and structures provide the framework and incentives through which the moral links essential for encouraging the accommodation and cooperation between societal groups. We have to scrutinise our “democratic” political institutions for their effectiveness in facilitating societal harmony, given our particularities.
The first idiosyncrasy that jumps out at us when we compare our society to some more stable “democratic” ones is the depth of our societal cleavages. For many well-documented historical, psychological and structural reasons, we are the quintessential ethnically plural society. We are not unique; in fact most states across the world are multicultural, even though the cleavages and conflicts may not always be as intense as ours.
Looking at the ethnic problematic across the globe, we have only a few options available to us to escape open conflict much less just undemocratic government: obliteration of ethnic differences, partition or some form of power sharing. With the spread of the now universally accepted norms of equality and self-determination, ethnic groups across the world have balked at the first option, concluded that we are too intermixed for partition and so are only left with the last option – “power sharing”.
One commentator (Sisk) defines this as “a system of governance in which all major segments of society are provided a permanent share of power; this system is often contrasted with government vs opposition systems in which ruling coalitions rotate among various social groups over time.”
In addressing the problematic of institutionalising democracy in plural societies, the two broad approaches are sometimes subsumed under the rubric of “power sharing”. One popular conception views it as sharing the executive offices of a government proportionately among the political representatives of the several groups mobilised in society. This view, of course, conceptualises “power” as a unitary construct residing in the executive branch of government and implicitly contraposes “sharing” power with a centralisation of power under majoritarian rules. This popular conception, of course, is reflective of our historical experiences, which saw the powers of the state always controlled by a tight little oligarchy – first centred on a colonial Governor and then our Executive Presidency.
Power, however, is a much more nuanced concept and even if confined to being a possession, rather than inhering in relationships, the power of a state is much more diffused than an executive possession.
Power sharing, in the second view, would have to include the wider picture, and would have to encompass a much wider range of institutions – both within and without the state such as the bureaucracy and the armed forces.
